Schwanfrau und Prinz: Die chinesische Frühform einer Divyāvadāna-Legende by Lǐ Wěi (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Schwanfrau und Prinz: Die chinesische Frühform einer Divyāvadāna-Legende by Lǐ Wěi Christoph Anderl (bio) Lǐ Wěi 李煒. Schwanfrau und Prinz: Die chinesische Frühform einer Divyāvadāna-Legende. East Asian Intercultural Studies series 7 (Interkulturelle Ostasienstudien 7). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2012. Paperback €54.00, isbn 978-3-447-06637-2. The book consists of a German translation of a popular and lengthy Buddhist narrative, the Sudhanāvadāna, a dramatic love story about Prince Sudhana (Shàncái 善財) and the Kinnarī princess Manoharā (Yuèyì 悅意), who combines features of a bird and a human. Caught by a hunter, the beautiful princess is given to Prince Sudhana. Although she is only half-human, he decides to take her as his wife and brings her to the court of his father. The two develop intense feelings of love and passion for each other but are separated through court intrigues initiated by advisors of the king. While Sudhana is on a military expedition, Manoharā is about to be sacrificed at the court. She is able to escape (having the features of a bird, she is able to fly) and returns to the kingdom of the Kinnarī, hoping that Sudhana will eventually find her. The prince has to go through an ordeal of dangerous tests and adventures in order to prove his determination to find her. Eventually, they are happily reunited. The story is extant in several Sanskrit, Chinese, and Tibetan versions and has been repeatedly dealt with in previous secondary literature (e.g., Schlingloff 1973; Straube 2006; Li et al. 2010),1 but this is the first complete rendering into a Western language, based on the Chinese translation by the famous Táng dynasty monk Yìjìng 義淨 (635–713).2 The book is divided into three parts: a text-critical section, a comparative translation of the Chinese version of the story translated by Yìjìng, and a very detailed bilingual glossary. The introduction is concise, trying to place Yìjìng’s translation within a stemmata of several Sanskrit versions of the story (using the method of tracing significant errors inherited between related versions).3 It would have been desirable to contextualize the translation of this narrative and to provide somewhat more information on the translation work of Yìjìng. As such, the introductory part remains somewhat minimalistic. One of the conclusions of Lǐ Wěi consists of the opinion that the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya is not the source of the Divyāvadāna (p. xvi), but, to the contrary, that the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya borrowed from an early (not extant) version of the Divyāvadāna (which the author dates to ca. 300 c.e.) collection, and that this early version was the source text that Yìjìng used for producing his Chinese rendering. Lǐ Wěi bases this conclusion mainly on the fact that the Chinese version of Yìyìng’s translation is somewhat shorter as compared to the extant Sanskrit versions of the text. Since Yìjìng usually translates rather literarily, Lĭ Wěi concludes that he must have used another version (which was shorter). This is an interesting hypothesis; however, it should have been dealt [End Page 293] with in more detail in order to make it convincing for the reader, since presently most scholars assume that the Divyāvadāna is based on the above Vinaya text.4 It also should be noted that Buddhist narrative literature shows great variation and flexibility and frequently different versions of popular stories coexisted, or the translator deliberately added or deleted sections. For example, in Chinese translations, erotically explicit parts or sections in which features of female beauty are described in detail are frequently left out or shortened. This is also the case in Yìjìng’s translation (see pp. 63–65 where the features of Manoharā are described). The main goal of Lǐ Wěi, as stated in the introduction, is the reconstruction of a no longer extant Sanskrit source text of an early version of the Divyāvadāna that Yìjìng used and—according to the author—differed from...